Judge, 1916-12-30 · page 13 of 29
Judge — December 30, 1916 — page 13: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a comedic domestic sketch (not political satire) depicting a wealthy widow, Belle Murrie, conversing with her lady's maid Janet in her bedroom. The humor centers on Belle's vanity and romantic preoccupations. The joke: Belle is obsessing over her appearance and weight, ostensibly for her own health but transparently because she's pursuing a man named Hendrick Melton. She claims indifference to his attention yet is "desperately in love with him," strategically maintaining an air of carelessness to manipulate his interest. The satire targets female vanity and the social dynamics of courtship among wealthy widow—Belle inherited significant wealth from her late husband and uses it to attract suitors, though she genuinely desires only Melton. Her anxious questions about whether men admire plumpness reveal her insecurity beneath the confident exterior. The maid serves as confidante and mirror for Belle's self-absorption, a common dynamic in period domestic fiction.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
XUM A BOUDOIR By J. A. CONFIDENCE WALDRON = sé HAT TIME is it, Janet?” Belle Murrie yawned as comfortably as an ingenious devi meant to discourage wrinkles in slumber— no matter what dreams might come—would permit, and sat up in bed. She had been awake for some time, pretending to sleep, watching the deft and noiseless work of her maid in preparation for this matuti- nal event, and had admired—perhaps envicd—Janet’s lithe, graceful figure and the piquant beauty of her face. “Eleven, madame,” was the maid’s reply as she let in a little more light. “Well, I shall not dress for a while. After my bath I shall have coffee and the papers in bed. I so love the way you man- age the cushions! You must be remotely Oriental, Janet!” “Oh, no, madame!” “T mean your ancestors. Why, some of mine might have been Oriental!” And indeed they might have been. As she undulated toward her bath she would have pleased any contempo- rary Oriental. Belle, a widow, was as gay as widows are wont to be after a scemly period following bereavement. She had adored her hu band, now deceased about two years, but was not brooding over a lonely state. Full-flowered beauty, abounding vitality and mental buoyancy have nothing in common with brooding. And her other gifts, perhaps, partly accounted for the fact that her suitors and her would-be suitors were many, and some of them persistent and insistent. These other gifts were also real—in fact they were realty—inherited as relict of the late Murray Murrie. She had coquetted with all the men who hung about her, for all of them ministered to her vanity. She had thought she never would fall in love again, and had not considered a second adventure in matrimony until Hendrick Melton appeared on her horizon. Then she became sentimen- tal in secret. Melton played about her as others did, yet never seemed in earnest. And thus, possibly, she fell des- perately in love with him, though she struggled constantly to keep from him all clues to her feeling, thinking that an assumed carelessness might affect him as his own had affected her. He was a handsome fellow, about her own age, and well to do. But she would have eloped with him and married him without a penny. “Do you think I am getting too stout?” Bell emerged from her bath and put herself in the s Janet. “Why, madame, really, I * “Come, Janet, don’t hesitate to tell me what you think. If Iam, I shall diet, and exercise, and get thinner in some way. That living skeleton, Ellen Brown, had the effrontery yesterday to tell me I was actually fat. U; What a word!” “T think, madam, you are pleasingly plump—only that— not even stout. And I’m sure there are as many who admire plumpness as there are who . " “Men? Do you think many men admire plumpness?” “Why not, madame?” “Well, I shall be weighed to-day—don’t let me forget it— ked as she illed hands of comicbooks.com